reb00ted

We can sustainably, fairly, do better. Let's go.

World after COVID-19

By Johannes Ernst

https://reb00ted.org/after-covid-19/

  • 2020-12-23

    35% of Americans are financially wiped out already

    Newsweek has the story:

    The latest data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, taken between November 25 and December 7, found that 35.3 percent of U.S. adults are “living in households not current on rent or mortgage where eviction or foreclosure in the next two months is either very likely or somewhat likely.”

    More than one third of adults.

    Washington D.C. holds the record with 67.3% in this survey.

    Can you imagine a third of all adults being evicted? Or two thirds in DC? I don’t think that is possible, because wouldn’t they have to move into the apartments and houses of other people being evicted, in a grand game of musical chairs? And if they indeed were evicted, with a third of the population suddenly homeless, the real estate market would totally collapse, and that wouldn’t make landlords happy either. So I would expect some kind of compromise to be found because it’s in the interest of renters and landlords, buyers and lenders.

    But if you are in danger of being evicted, it means that you are basically wiped out financially. Risking the roof over your head, or any roof over your head, is not something anybody does easily.

    But we are nowhere done with COVID-19. We may have made it into the second half of the pandemic, but not by much: vaccination has only started, and is supposed to continue into the summer. So if by now 35% of people are wiped out, what about, say 6 months from now?

    And even if they somehow make it, and we beat back the virus, how are 35% of people, or more by the summer, ever supposed to financially recover? Just the accumulated debt would take years to pay off even with good jobs. Which are in short supply, and shorter supply now given the impact the pandemic is having on even further worsening inequality.

    Many have been wondering why there aren’t more people on the streets, demanding a proper government response. They simply may not because a pandemic is going on. Once the threat from the virus recedes, however, there may be a very hot summer.

  • 2020-07-16

    What if COVID-19 doesn’t end?

    All the discussion has been around how to limit new infections, and how to cope for as long as COVID-19 has no cure. It’s been terrible enough, particularly in shockingly incompetent countries like the US. We’ve consoled ourselves with the hope that even if things are terrible now, science is working hard on a vaccine, and even if it takes a year or more, one day we will have one, we get everybody injected, and then the pandemic nightmare is over and we can go back to normal.

    Based on recent news, we may have to rethink that plan. If it indeed turns out that antibodies disappear within months from infected people, chances are that antibodies will also disappear from vaccinated people. Which would make vaccination, should a vaccine be found, only effective for a few months.

    Which would mean you’d have to re-vaccinate every, say, 6 months. In a country the size of the US, you’d have to vaccinate, say, 200 million people (herd immunity) every 6 months, which means 2 million vaccinations every single business day.

    I don’t think that works. And it certainly does not work in poorer countries with less infrastructure.

    So there is now a real possibility that COVID-19 will not go away. And even if we were willing to accept the death rate on a permanent basis, it’s hard to believe we could accept the 10x larger number of permanently injured people that results.

    Which would mean that the current state of affairs would become permanent:

    • severely curtailed long-distance travel, with long mandatory quarantines upon entry;
    • no large / mass events ever again;
    • far less in-person contact than we’ve been used to as a species;
    • contact tracing and mandatory quarantines as core functions of government, and probably not very gentle ones at that;
    • fewer vacations, with a much smaller range of possible vacation activities;
    • entire industries become non-viable.

    Certain? No. Possible? Entirely. We may want to start considering this as a real possibility.

  • 2020-07-11

    Uncommon, worthwhile insights on AI and the climate emergency by Cory Doctorow

    Published in Locus Magazine. Here are some selective quotes with comments.

    I am an AI skeptic. I am baffled by anyone who isn’t.

    I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) “machine learning” field that leads to a general AI any more than I can see a path from continuous improvements in horse-breeding that leads to an internal combustion engine.

    Yep. Let me add that everybody I have encountered who is hyping a future AI nirvana has something to sell. So let’s treat it like the claims of any salesman who sells miracle cures.

    Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive tasks, like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland, building high-speed rail links to replace aviation links, caring for hundreds of millions of traumatized, displaced people, and treating runaway zoontoic and insectborne pandemics.

    These tasks will absorb more than 100% of any labor freed up by automation

    Putting aside whether we can “remediate climate change” (given where we are, IMHO we can now at best hope to adapt to it somehow), he’s absolutely correct that whatever we attempt to do, is going to be immensely labor-intensive. And because it’s all new and hasn’t been done before, it cannot really be automated, as automation is fundamentlly about having machines repeat the same thing over and over again. (If you agree with him, as I do, that a general AI is a looong time away and certainly will not arrive in time to solve this crisis for us; it should have arrived 30-50 years ago then.)

    … the locus of the problem with technological unemployment: it’s not a technological problem at all, it’s an economic one.

    Exactly. If technology suddenly took the jobs of gazillions of people, it’s not like there is nothing that the world needs to get done any more. Look around you: there are tons of things that should get done, from sweeping the street you live on more often to spending quality time with foster children or teaching people online the basics of science so they won’t fall for as many hoaxes.

    Our current economic system always has had this very baffling feature of sending people home to watch TV when the economy tanks, instead of making us all work much harder to get the economy back out of the hole it is in! It’s the opposite of what should happen!

    And as Cory says, the reason why this happens is because private sector employment is correlated with economic success. Not with the number and size of the problems to be solved. This is particularly important because many believe, myself included, that any realistic attempt to deal with the crisis will have to accept some form of economic de-growth, aka shrinkage. While creating a lot of work.

    when the pandemic crisis is over, 30% of the world will either be unemployed or working for governments.

    Very possibly so. But unlike what Cory implies, there will also be a significant (30%? Similar to the unemployment rate?) downturn in income. That’s because if 30% of people don’t work, or work in jobs for which no business model exists, they don’t produce things that others will pay for, and so we are all commensurately poorer. Money printing may make this effect less visible in prices, but as he says, money printing does not produce the things we need or want.

    Here’s the full piece published by Locus Magazine. Unfortunately it also contains a bunch of mistakes, such as about the consequences of money printing. I have chosen to ignore those because the good points are really worthwhile and shouldn’t be obscured.

  • 2020-04-27

    We are likely underestimating the impact of COVID-19

    The Atlantic says COVID-19 is Stretching the International Order to Its Breaking Point.

    Reuters writes that IMF (International Monetary Fund) sees coronavirus-induced global downturn ‘way worse" than financial crisis.

    Foreign policy magazine thinks The Coronavirus Is the Biggest Emerging Markets Crisis Ever.

    The last time we had a pandemic, in 1918, the empires of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany ended (of course, there was also World War I, but it’s still an interesting coincidence).

    The biggest pandemic in European history, the Black Death in the 14th century, is credited with ending feudalism.

    We are thinking too small in terms of impact.